Sports Mouth Injuries

Over the years I have seen to many sports related mouth injuries. Most of these injuries happen during practices, not games! The main reason is the kids do not wear their mouthguards during the practice. We practice far more than we play the game, so it just makes sense to always wear your mouthguard!

Here are a few of the dental/mouth injuries I have seen:

This photo was taken 2 weeks after the injury. This young man went out on the ice for practice warm-ups not only without his mouthguard, but also without his helmet! Wrong place, wrong time and suddenly he was missing 2 teeth (one upper and one lower) and 3 badly broken. Needless to say he suffered through one and a half years of dental rehabilitation and thousands of dollars that could have been avoided with a mouthguard (not too mention a helmet in this case!)

I believe that if he had worn a mouthguard even without a helmet he would not have lost any teeth...they may have chipped or broken but no loss.

This young man was at football practice without his mouthguard.

I asked him "Why weren't you wearing your mouthguard?" His response "it's only practice, I only wear it for games".

Although we got a very nice result, this tooth needed a root canal and will need to be repaired multiple times during his lifetime.All preventable with a mouthguard.